By Ian Shields, UK Defence Forum Research Associate

The oft-quoted Chinese curse about "living in troubled times" certainly seems to be with us at present. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and continuing unrest in the Maghreb and the Middle East (now spreading to the Gulf): the world is jittery and that is without asking what is happening with Somali piracy, the development of nuclear weapons in Iran, or continuing tensions between North and South Korea. Meanwhile both the US and Britain are significantly committed in military terms to Afghanistan in particular, and the capacity to undertake additional tasks (such as the new No-Fly Zone over Libya) is therefore necessarily limited (albeit that that is not the same as impossible). This short piece will concentrate on events in Japan, Libya and Bahrain and ask how, together (although they are not necessarily connected), they should give cause for concern.

The short answer to the question implied in my previous paragraph is instability. When the world undergoes a period of significant change - be that man-made (such as political change) or natural (earthquake, tsunami) confidence in international organisations, norms and stability is

undermined. Given the knife-edge on which we continue to balance (the famous clock of the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists remains set at 6 minutes to midnight - see: http://www.thebulletin.org/ - so one group at least is far from sanguine about the prospects for world peace) such feelings of insecurity are not to be welcomed. So why might we feel particularly uncertain about security at present? I offer six areas that concern me.